- Venue
- Black Dog Publishing
- Location
- London
Commonsensual: The Work of Rut Blees Luxemburg
Black Dog Publishing London £29.95
ISBN 978-1-906155-57-5
Hardback, 29.0 x 24.0 cm, 208 pages
There’s a book on my shelf I keep meaning to read. Several thoughtful women artist friends recommend it highly; in fact one of them purchased the very copy that sits on my shelf. It is Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, a history of walking. One of my favourite things about this book, besides the promise it continues to hold, is its cover. It features Roger Fenton’s photograph The Long Walk, Windsor made circa 1858. Windsor itself is barely visible in mist, while the trees are fulsome and sensual; you could sink your fingers into their crowns. The Long Walk itself glows like a bone dividing the scene straight through the middle thanks to the heavy cropping by the bookcover designers. The dreamlike emptiness of the path includes the diminutive but graceful figure of a woman to the right, placed like figures were traditionally set by 18thC landscape painters, to emphasize the grandeur of the scene and draw it back into a human story no matter how unknowable that may be.
How directly the work of Rut Blees Luxemburg’s seems to link with this rendition of The Long Walk, especially since the paperback features an orange-tinged design that merges carefully with the denseness of the not quite colourless tones of the original albumen silver print. It reminded me of Luxemburg’s work, just vaguely. Before seeing Commonsensual my overriding memory of her oeuvre was of damp pavement shot in the monochrome of sodium oxide streetlighting. The human story remained unknowable but full of foreboding.
The draw of this weighty Black Dog publication, proportioned like a 35mm negative, is the opportunity to move through this artist’s projects and get beyond the moody images towards test shots, and a script and maybe an understanding of what that artist is performing.
Mood is hard to shake though. Here’s the cover: I see a rocky outcrop against lowering dark sky. A white modern building is glimpsed beyond it, but the windows shine blindly. If you were lying injured or trapped at the spot where Luxemburg positioned herself, no one would notice you. You’re alone with the rock and whatever followed you.
Not everyone would look at this and recall the opening scenes of Alice Sebold’s book Lucky. I am projecting fear and rape here, but this photographer’s trademark is to charge a scene with some kind of furious story evacuated of protagonists.
The book is a page turner and it rewards the patient ‘reader’. In fact the photographs demand to be read, each carefully titled, often ironic, not to be missed. The project names could be music album titles or poetry collections. “The Spore”, “Pip and Pith”.
You get used to the light and turning over pages becomes a nightwalk, a tour that you tune into rather than absorb dutifully, like a Janet Cardiff soundwork. Your nocturnal wariness kicks in and you follow Luxemburg into this no man’s land enjoying the twist into fiction that she manages so deftly.
The first image of “Vertiginous Exhilaration” makes me feel I am being dangled over a carpark, seeing my last moments.
Luxemburg picks up on the recharging energy of the dark, of the interludes of empty space. My initial interest in seeing this publication was to see how she’d developed the night shot over the last 10 years. I’ve enjoyed the richness of these images, but the revelation waited until I arrived at the section “Stations”. If you read the texts and absorb the book hook, line and sinker you are also drawn into philosophical conjecture tainted by a savvy ‘cool’ generated by a specific age group, that “metro” artworld – in a nutshell. But there are images in “Stations” that seem to take the photographer out of that knowing comfort zone of urban prowling.
She steps inside a church. “Normandy Iconoclasm” disturbs with its vicious defacement of a carved monk-robbed figure that we see just beyond the bulky looking lightswitch and plug that betray its painfully diminutive size. “Faith in Infrastructure” swings the camera overhead to seize the interior of a gothic chapel roof upside down, mottled with a scrappy infusion of daylight forcing its way through the foliage outside. For once the photographer is not looking down at the puddles, and there’s a quaint moment of blinding light that swallows you up in a very different vertiginous exhilaration from the beginning; here is a giddy faith. And we are the tiny figure in the 18thC landscape.
Commonsensual presents this collection of photographs like a schema for a retrospective. One can imagine each section as a room using the same titles and populated with the same works. This book is more than a portfolio and less than an archive, but what makes it worth having and revisiting is that it has got a sense of suspense and reaches up and grabs you off the page. Fiction is performed and the photographs become a book.